Stardate 020070907: Las Cruces, NM

Las Cruces, New Mexico, 32,3 degrees North. Let's say, a bit different place than Oulu in Finland :D First of all: the weather.. Wow! It's basically sun sun sun every single day and also hot hot hot every day :) I already discovered that I don't have enough shorts. Like today, sun shine with almost no clouds, some plus 32. What more can you ask :D

Me in the campus
Still from campus

Second: the university.. The whole idea how to arrange the buildings.. I think it's really "cute". For me a univeristy building is some massive and huge looking like some insitution or something :P But here the university is scattered to a wide area and each department has it's own tiny biulding with no more than two floors. In fact I don't think that any building in this city has more than 3 or 4 floors! Well, of course the city of Las Cruces is quite small, with only some 80 000 people living here.

More campus area with some observation towers
and the "Aggie hill" behind where we climbed

Third: sports.. Everybody does some sort of sport, football, vollyball, swimming etc etc. And there's this whole huge fuss around sports everywhere. It's called the Aggies. Yes, all the teams of New Mexico State Unversity are Aggies. Go Aggies, Aggies this and Aggies that all over the place. And I'm not kidding or exaggerating..*everywhere*. Well, for me it's something quite different.. and kind of funny too :) Plus I heard that the team itself is not so good anyway :P

Go Aggies

So, there are some things that I have noticed so far. Of course there are many others but here's something for starters. Then, what did I manage to do within these few days here.. Well, I went to all of my classes some 2 weeks late so I guess I have to catch up quite a bit on those. Also I have been a "Japanese tourist" taking pictures of everything :P I managed to go to the Wal Mart and a mall already too. Plus did some crazy walking with another Finnish girl here called Saara. We climbed up a small hill above the city one night and did some 20 kms in total. Plus we walked to the mall, which was also some 10 kms... Some more walking on the way I think! Until I get a bike or car at least :P

Next to the desert...
View of the city

A party. Yes, there are some parties going on all the time. I managed to go to one of those so far, which was a birthday party of one exchange student from Austria. Well, it's not so good idea to throw a party in this place because the police might interrupt you and take you to jail if there are some underaged people involved. So it happened that suddenly a policeman came and pointed a flash light to everybody's face and told no one to move. Then he went around and checked everybody's ids. Quite funny :P Nothing else happened in the end except that we had to finish the party.

There would be many other things to describe but I'll leave to another time then!

My home
A panoramic view of the surroundings in Las Cruces